Interview with Twitch Co-Founder on Success

Excuse me, sir. Sir, question for you. How did you get rich?

What?

How did you get rich?

Hey, fall back. Hold on.

Hey, real, real quick, sir. How did you get rich?

I got a channel with 22 million followers.

I interview billionaires all over the world.

Have you heard of a website called Twitch?

Twitch, the streaming company?

The streaming company.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm a co-founder of that.

You founded Twitch?

Yeah.

What was the most amount of money you made in a single year?

Well, we sold it in 2014 for 970 mil.

970 million?

Yeah.

Can I interview you for a minute real quick?

Sure.

Do you have to be a little crazy to become this successful?

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to have

that tweaked sense of risk where you're

like, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna figure it out."

You sold your company for $970 million. Who did you sell your company to?

Amazon in 2014.

What was it like negotiating with Amazon?

It's one of the biggest companies in the world.

We tried to sell it to Google first. We got all the way up to the finish line.

They almost bought it, and then we couldn't agree on some terms,

and then-

What was their offer, if you can share?

It was almost a billion dollars.

So you walked away-

We're not doing it

... from a billion bucks?

We walked away, and Amazon came in. They're fierce negotiators.

So what is your best negotiation advice to anybody in business?

I think you always wanna have options. You cannot be desperate.

Don't negotiate from a place of weakness.

How did you come up with the idea for Twitch?

What started off as something very different, this is, like,

before Instagram, you

know, even before Twitter existed.

We had this idea for creating a streaming company around one channel, which was

just me wearing a camera around 24/7. We launched that. People came.

They were like, "Hey, I wanna create my own stream, too.

How do I do that?" And then eventually, that turned into Twitch.

Did you have people that doubted you when you started Twitch?

I mean, yeah. People were like, "This is the dumbest idea ever." My dad

was like, I

told him, I was like-

Oh

... "Hey, I wanna stream my life," and they were, like, laughing at me,

you know?

Why didn't you listen to those people?

If someone could talk you out of your idea for your business, that's a bad sign.

I was just like, "Oh, this is a cool idea.

Let's fucking do it." Praise God it worked out.

Have you ever been depressed?

I've been depressed, even post-Twitch, actually.

Selling Twitch-

You sold a company for-

Yeah

... almost a billion dollars, and you were depressed?

Yeah. You know, when I say this, people are like, think it's bullshit,

right?

But money doesn't make you happy. Money can help you be secure, but money

alone will never give you lasting happiness.

I always tell people, "Do what you would do

if no one ever found out about it and

you didn't make any money from it. If tomorrow it completely failed,

you wouldn't

feel like you wasted all your time today."

Beautiful advice, man. You gave an incredible interview.

And I connect with all the billionaires I interview. Could I get your contact?

Yeah, of course.